


Demons Run

by for_darkness_shows_the_stars



Series: What Comes After [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: And it's not Fair, Angst, Episode: s03e21 Sozin's Comet Part 4 Avatar Aang, Gaang (Avatar) as Family, Gen, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Katara/Zuko (Avatar), The Gaang are just kids, and they have the weight of the world on their shoulders, dadkoda, not very graphic tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:14:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27289222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/for_darkness_shows_the_stars/pseuds/for_darkness_shows_the_stars
Summary: The first night after they have won the War, they all collapse into one bed together.
Relationships: Hakoda & The Gaang (Avatar), Sokka/Suki (Avatar), The Gaang (Avatar) - Relationship
Series: What Comes After [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1981828
Comments: 12
Kudos: 229





	Demons Run

_Demons run,_

_But count the cost,_

_The battle is won_

_But the child is lost_

_\- Doctor Who_

The first night after they have won the War, they all collapse into one bed together.

Zuko’s bed, to be precise, because it’s the largest, and he’s already there, since getting up and walking about is a bit challenging for someone who has just taken a lightning bolt to the heart.

They don’t arrange it. It’s not the sort of sleepover thousands of children their age have, full of bright laughter and gossip. It’s a solemn occasion, quiet and sombre. There is understanding in their eyes, as they all curl up together so tight that no-one can be sure which limb belongs to who.

There’s Sokka and Suki, entangled together like any space existing between them physically aches. Sokka’s back is pressed up against his sister’s, who has curled into the side of the young soon-to-be-Firelord, her head resting in the crook of his shoulder. Zuko is turned to her, face buried into her hair. Toph has made herself at home amongst their legs, clutching at her friends’ clothes as though letting go of _that_ would mean letting go of Sokka’s hand, _and into the raging inferno below, blind, blind, truly blind for the first time in her life—_ Aang rests on Zuko’s other side, tightly wound.

They do not have nightmares tonight. They are too tired to dream.

(Tomorrow, and the day after that, and nearly every night in the future years, they won’t be quite so lucky.)

But here they are, and though it’s highly irregular for there to be a sleepover in the Firelord’s bedchamber, none of the servants or guards have the heart to stop them, as, one by one, they all wander in, faces gloomy and eyes heavy with horrors they have seen.

They latch onto each other like there’s no tomorrow, like any moment, a ghoul or a spirit or a monster of a far more human kind willappear and try to tear one of them away. They latch onto each other like each other is all they have.

It’s not—it will never be again, but they don’t know that yet.

The next morning, when the newly-arrived Chief Hakoda seeks his children only to find their beds empty, here, in the grandiose scarlet halls of the Fire Palace, he will panic—some deeply-ingrained instinct that wakes in him whenever he lays his eyes upon the colour red, and there is no escaping it here.

In his mad dash over the halls, his children’s names become a prayer on his lips, prayer to Tui, to La, even to Agni, if it is indeed true that the Sun Spirit is the one who watches over these lands.

(Hakoda thinks that, if he truly does care for his people, _these_ people, Agni must’ve wept his golden tears for the past one hundred years, seeing what has become of them.)

But the woman who happens upon him doesn’t need him to string full sentences in his panic. She is ancient, and for a brief moment he wonders if she has seen Sozin himself fall to madness, but all and any thoughts vanish when faced with the possibility of his children coming to harm.

The woman, however, simply directs him. His mind cannot follow where she leads him, and currently, he doesn’t care.

She leads him to a doorway—grand and red and gold, like everything here. He thinks he might suffocate in the reds, but they simply _fit_ this place, until it feels like removing them would be a travesty.

The children are there, not just his own but all of them, sound asleep. There are purple shadows beneath their eyes, faces drawn and tense even in sleep.

(Children. Children fought in this War, and children ended it, and now children will be responsible for rebuilding the World. He thinks of Katara, his sweet Katara, her eyes frosty as she all but drowned that Fire Navy ship. He thinks of Sokka, brave and confident, planning an invasion with cold precision and calculation.)

(He thinks of the others—the Avatar, a child in the truest sense of the word, forced into a role that would make grown men quiver. He thinks of Toph, her unfailing confidence that almost made him forget how young she was most of the time. He thinks of Prince Zuko—Firelord, soon enough, a boy whose face told a story he dreads to ever learn. He thinks of Suki—a warrior child, a girl who’d been locked up in the same prison as him.)

(Children saved the World, and all they had to pay in exchange is everything that made them children. Because grown men—men like _him_ —were unable to.)

(It’s not fair. It’s not fair, and he wants to rage against the Spirits, against Tui and La and Agni and Oma and Shu and even damned Koh, rage and scream and plead at the injustice of it.)

(But Spirits have never cared for justice.)

(Or innocence.)

They are wrapped up together, and if this weren’t the Fire Nation, and it wasn’t the end of summer, he’d have thought they were fending off the cold.

Cold of the outside is easy to fend off, he knows. It’s one on the inside that’s hard.

He left, so that his children would never have to know it—what a fool he’d been. Here they are, in the centre of it all. They won … but at what cost.

“Let them sleep,” the ancient woman—a servant, he can tell from her garb, a detail that had escaped him in his panic—says.

“I wasn’t planning on waking them,” Hakoda whispers. “Not … not yet anyway. They’ve given too much already.”

The woman nods, and even though she’s a servant and he a Head of State, he still feels as though he has just passed a test. “Your children are remarkable people,” she says quietly.

“I know they are,” he says. “They’ve always been.”

“I saw Princess Azula grow from a sweet, if a bit heedless of others’ feelings girl into a monster under that man’s tutelage,” she whispers gravely. “I saw her succumb to madness, until she was capable of burning down the World and herself to fill up the emptiness he had carved into her.” Her gaze falls down, and Hakoda wonders if the terrifying girl he’d met in the Boiling Rock, if by _met_ one means _was very nearly incinerated by_ could once have been a child like Katara or Sokka. Maybe. “And your daughter subdued her … defeated her, and let her live.” Her eyes find Hakoda’s, and bore into them until he feels like squirming under her gaze. “That takes more than one type of strength.”

“I know that.”

The woman nods. “Good. Let us go now … let the children sleep. Let grown men carry the World on their shoulders for just a little while longer.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr.](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/stars-and-darkness)


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